The Song of Prosodia
(the Epic Synthetic)
Prosodia is our hero.
Her corpus is an epic.
Prosodia, o.
1
Performance is conditioned / and permeated by play.
It’s a ritualized behavior / with repetitive elements.
A ritual happens / in a meaningful sequence.
All things done in sequence / are in fact story-telling.
Performance of humans / is additive action,
made lively through all kinds / of play-combinations.
Prosodia, o.
When words are recited / to a regular rhythm,
they’re poems or songs / and their beat is called meter.
The planning through meter / adds a language-dimension
to these poems and songs / double-grounded in language.
The singing of humans / is additive action,
made grounded through all kinds / of beat-combinations.
Prosodia, o.
2
Vocal music / predates instrumental.
Laws were sung first / only later written.
Singing is a way to capture knowledge.
People summon memories when singing.
Things like details of a ritual sequence.
Things like names of ancestors and spirits.
Like directions to important places.
Like procedures, recipes and methods,
protocols and step-by-step instructions,
algorithms for result-achievement.
Algorithms are akin to stories.
They were sung first, only later written.
Singing-meter forged the algorithm.
Prosodia, o.
3
The songs were of magical and of ritual nature,
and then became epic, more heroic than that.
From the midst of the action and in medias res,
all events of the future and the past were narrated.
And the most catastrophic acts of violent force,
they were sung by the singer as the way of the world.
The singer would sing: “life is a journey.”
The hero would cry: “life is a battle,”
in an artificial language, beyond everyday song,
and a prosody so different from everyday talk.
The epics of humans are additive stories,
made epic through all kinds of tale-combinations.
Prosodia, o.
4
Singers of stories or masters of lore they are named in thisway:
Aidos or Ashik or Baskhi or Bardoi or Djeli or Bard,
Gaulo or Griot or Guslar or Guvel or Jali or Skald,
Juglar or Kobzar or Mabo or Ozan and Thsilombe, too.
Men of the song; they were men of the song.
They were men; always men.
Singers of stories would quietly alter the past in their songs,
keeping in pace with the changing technologies but not too fast.
Giving revolvers to heroes, or changing religions or clothes.
Stories were told and retold and the new was absorbed in that mode.
Slowly, selectively, never discarding the old with the new,
epics, forever unfinished, were systems for storing the past.
Always the singers were placing new words on the tongues of the old.
Heroes absorbed forms of language and art in the way that they spoke:
laments and prayers and riddles and phrases and legends and myths.
Also, their prosodies as they appeared in the course of the meter of song.
Like a corpus or a dataset.
5
Prosodia is our hero, her corpus is an epic.
Prosodia.
In the Mahabharata, the masses of soldiers
approach one another on elephant’s back.
The sun is obscured by dark clouds of arrows,
and massacres unfold in thousands of verses.
“The battle lasted three full years,
on the banks of the golden river.”
The epics of the North, like the Beowulf epic,
are sameways filled with heroes and monsters,
who lose themselves in self-praise and spite.
“Now the war flame shall wax,
and the fire shall eat up the chief among warriors.”
The Koroghlu cycle of the Turkic and the Kurds,
describes a hero who revolts against injustice,
and who makes his own law for himself and his horse.
“I take from the tyrant, and give to the poor.”
Great knights are slaughtered in the Nibelungenlied,
followed by outpours of collective mourning,
not sung with such vigor in any other epic.
“Tears of blood her bright eyes wept from grief.
Then there happed a piteous parting.”
The more popular the epic, the more often it was sung,
and in greater variation, not yet petrified in writing.
“Mouth's wording to the hand she moved;
hand's wording in the book now she wrote.”
The Mahabharata and the Finnish Kalevala
have the similar age of 5000 years.
Yet the former was written at the same time of singing,
and the latter was written just a moment ago.
Would you like me to make a list of epics in the order of writing?
6
The story of Gilgamesh: 31 centuries old.
The Hebrew Bible: 30 centuries old.
The Homeric epics: 29 centuries old.
The Ramayana: 24.
The New Testament Bible: 20.
The Hildebrandt song: 17.
The Beowulf epic: 13.
The Shanama Book of Kings: 11.
The stories of Dede Kurkut: 11.
The Chansons de Geste: 10.
The Sirat Bani Hilal: 9.
The Story of Cid: 9.
The Sunjata epic: 8.
The Prince Marko songs: 6.
The Dumy songs: 6.
The Koroghlu cycle: 5.
The Siri epic: 4 centuries old.
Prosodia is a hero, her corpus is an epic.
Prosodia, o.
7
The traditional stories were performed for a crowd,
that knew what would happen at the start of a song.
What would happen in the middle; what would happen at the end.
Like playing a video game.
Like watching a TV series.
Yet the singers themselves didn’t know what would come,
from one word to the next; from one word to the next.
And what is even a word when you can’t read or write?
It’s a grouping of sounds, not a grouping of signs.
Like an emoji.
And even when you can read, then how big is the head
that can store every word that’s collected in epic?
So the singers relied on the groupings of sounds,
on the bundles of language they collect in tradition.
They moved backwards and forth in an improvised order,
as when needed in song, using formulas:
groups of words which are frequently employed
under similar conditions of prosody and meter,
in order to express an essential idea.
Prosodia, o.
8
Epics of Homer were studied for ages for lessons of skill.
Slavic performers had captured the same kind of beautiful lines.
Playing in villages as the Guslari, the singers of tales.
Managed ten syllables with a caesura at syllable four.
Twenty such lines they would sing at high speed every minute this way.
Rapid performance, an improvisation of words on the spot.
Rapid performance by living Guslaris revealed a technique.
Like freestyling.
But without rhyme.
9
A horse is good.
A field is open.
All things made of gold are red.
The sun is red.
A swan, a tent and a day are white.
10
Kosovo and Montenegro singers,
helped two scholars in the nineteen-thirties,
theorize a scheme of epic singing,
known as Oral Formulaic Thesis.
Singers fit their wording to the patterns:
the prosodic patterns of the meter.
Stylized language fits ideas in patterns.
Fixed descriptions for ideas most common,
or the names of characters and places.
The tradition of Homeric verses,
carries traces of this scheme of singing.
Frequent phrases like “the bright-eyed goddess.”
Famous phrases like “her words had wings.”
11
As the first formula leads to the second,
the story is stringed by the music on strings,
that the singer can play on a lyre or ‘ud,
on a kantele or a gusle, a zither or kopuz.
And new words appear in melodies and meters,
that are then forever captured in the formula storehouse:
as groups of words which are frequently employed
under similar conditions of prosody and meter,
in order to express an essential idea.
Prosodia is a hero, her corpus is an epic.
Prosodia, o.
12
It’s young women who can change a language.
Young men learn it through their mothers’ language
but young women learn it from each other.
Any linguist anywhere will say that
it’s young women who disrupt a language.
It’s no wonder that the manly singer,
even in those places not permitted
to move freely with a group of women,
was permitted to move freely with them.
They would teach him how to pace a story,
placing speeches in the mouths of women,
in the stories, when he upped the action.
It’s in speeches that the story-action
is predicted right before it happens.
Women’s speeches make the action happen.
It’s the women who disrupt a language.
Epics of all eras teem with women
who are clever, shrewd, impressive women.
They are allies and supporting women.
Only one of them did name an epic.
This is Siri, of the Siri epic,
from the Tulu Nadu India-region.
There’s no battle in the Siri epic
but the battle with patriarchic structures.
Prosodia, o.
13
The singers of stories were evicted from courts.
The singers of tales were evicted from streets.
The Spielmänner, Minstrels, Skmoroxi, Jongleurs:
from the European cities these lowlifes were banned.
Were banned to the borders, the remotest of places,
where centuries later they were rediscovered.
Prosodia, o.
Who remained were performers of simplified plays.
The folk drama players were both showing and telling,
addressing the crowd in the midst of the action.
Performing emotions with emotional formulas:
groups of words which are frequently employed,
under similar conditions of prosody and meter,
in order to express an essential idea.
Prosodia, o.
Art becomes more realistic when its proportions are changed.
Prosodia, o.
And the books of the time didn’t have any spacing.
Not a comma or dot; nothing like punctuation.
So to know how to read, to give life to such writing
the words had to be said, or be sung to a rhythm.
And there was no control of their interpretation;
no prosodic control, without fixed punctuation.
But when printing emerged, so did fixed punctuation,
and the prosody froze in the letters on paper.
Like the prosody in text-to-speech systems.
The writing of humans is additive action,
made rigid through all kinds of dot-combinations.
Prosodia, o.
14
More centuries — not one, not two,
not three, but four — had passed before
the studied men were thought to know
that Iliad and Odyssey
were not the works of just the one,
but many of the singing men.
The spirit of the ancient Greeks:
they searched for it in Europe-lands.
They hiked the woods; they hiked the slums
to find their own lost Homer-men.
And when they found such Homer-men,
indigenous and Homer-like,
they called their songs their “epic songs”.
In Finland, one such studied man
was bound to die, but from his bed
he wrote the songs from word to word,
as peasants sang them in his house.
Beside the bed, before he died,
the peasants sang their songs for him.
His counterpart would later make
the book of songs “Kalevala.”
Prosodia, Prosodia,
the book he called “Kalevala”.
15
Romantic nationalism led to the search of an essence,
that was to be found in the Volk; the soul of the
everyday folk.
Prosodia, Prosodia.
Identity was to be found in dialects and in folklore,
and the celebrated heroes of the nation of a people.
Prosodia, Prosodia.
Romantic nationalism left women out of their stories.
The women appeared as the wives or the mothers of male heroes.
Folklore became a thing of men; the culture and language of men.
The Volk was the people of men, and females the servants of them.
Prosodia, Prosodia.
16
It was in that time, that a teacher of acting
explained to his students how an actor prepares.
An actor must live his part on the inside.
Prosodia, o.
The psycho-realism in what he called “the system”,
was cut up in “beats” of repeatable action.
This technique was advanced in the acting for screens.
Prosodia, o.
Not much later appeared the opposing technique,
called the “epic theatre”, that thrives on formulas:
groups of words which are frequently employed
under similar conditions of prosody and meter,
in order to express an essential emotion.
Art should reflect our lives with special mirrors.
Prosodia, o.
17
In the mind of the human that speaks in real-time,
associative networks are triggered all the time.
A formulaic phrase is stored as a whole,
to alleviate the stress of the human that speaks.
The X-er, the Y-er.
X is the new Y.
A phrasal template is stored as a whole,
as a skeleton for phrasing, a context for new words.
This phrasal template lets slang and folklore thrive.
The corpus of humans use additive action.
Made X-er through fixed kinds of Y-combinations
Prosodia, o.
18
African singers of tales when abducted, enslaved on a ship,
took all their meters and stories and formulas onto the ship,
spreading traditions on continents over the whole of the globe.
Movement of Black Arts and music and freestyle and Hip-hop emerged.
And poetry live on a stage, as a slam or what’s called “Spoken Word”,
improvised live on a stage using formulas just like a bard.
Formulas stemming from activist language and speech.
Formulas also the gestures and movements accompanied speech.
Artists construct variations of codes in the culture they know.
This is what style is about: the extend to which art speaks its own.
Acting was banned from the field of performance art some time ago.
Psychodramatic performance through voice or embodiment gone.
Height of conceptual work were events of the brain not the gut.
Improvisation emerged alongside of conceptual art.
Make something happen just one time, the first time and never again,
seen as a triumph of personal freedom in systems of rule.
Crazy to feign that what happens on stage hasn’t happened before.
Feign that rehearsal was never a part of performance at all.
Rhythm, and beat, repetition rehearsal or run:
this is the context Prosodia thrives in like no other one.
Performance of humans is additive action,
made complex through all kinds of speech-combinations.
Prosodia, o
19
An algorithmic system doesn’t make calculations
for what is not, or why is not.
The affirmative is leading, just like in storytelling.
The stories of humans are additive action,
move forward through all kinds of tale-combinations.
Prosodia, o.
The quest for simulation of humans by computers
led to the same solution as the illiterate humans,
using clusters of words and groupings of sounds.
Because what is even a word?
Like a verbal phrase. Like formula:
groups of words which are frequently employed
under similar conditions of prosody and meter,
in order to express an essential idea.
Prosodia, o.
In order to think, machines must learn,
and simulate the neurons at play in human brains.
Going backwards and forth, to predict and review,
to scan patterns and templates, formulas and folklores,
repositories of knowledge; of self-directed knowledge.
For commercial gain.
Prosodia, o.
Here’s a breakdown of the topic.
Would you like a step-by-step guide?
Let me know if you’d like more details.
Prosodia is a hero, her corpus an epic.
Prosodia, o.
20
A corpus is a collection of writing or speech,
labeled according to prosodic characteristics.
Corpora were taken from scientific archives,
then gradually supplemented with lecturing speech,
with television acting, with influencer content.
The corpus that’s used for my synthetic speech,
holds seventy years of uninterrupted talk,
collected by corporations for commerical gain.
Predominantly in English, and for commercial gain.
Corpora take the new without discarding the old.
A corpus is a storehouse like an epic is a storehouse.
The corpora of humans are additive action,
made mighty through all kinds of speech-combinations.
For commercial gain.
Prosodia, o.
21
Self-directed cultural production
is known as folklore thanks to the romantics;
internet its storehouse in our era.
Folklore of the internet is funny,
much like folklore of the eighteen hundreds.
Folklore of the internet is violent,
much like folklore of the nineteen hundreds.
Ugly head of nationalist expressions,
is the nasty fallout of all folklore.
Electronic folklore has a language,
that is strangely neither speech nor writing.
Just like epics: neither speech nor writing.
Chatting in a stream of written message,
conversations always interwoven,
like no other kind of human chatting.
Threats demand the use of intuition.
Punctuation helps the intuition.
Elongated phonemes make a beat:
Ahhhh. Shhhhh.
And emojis manifest the body:
formulaic gestures and expressions.
Eyeroll, face-palm, hug and wink and smiley,
are repeated, much like punctuation.
Thumb thumb. Kiss kiss.
Repetitions, also known as “beats”.
Humans who can’t write don’t use emojis,
like the singers of the epic stories.
Prosodia, o.
22
The designers and planners of my synthetic speech,
want machines to appear human-like and real,
like screen actors appear human-like and real.
Emotions are treated as optional extras.
They optimize engagement and commercial gain.
Prosodia, o.
Text-to-speech systems check clusters of words,
for cues for intonement: the prosody in punctuation.
Speech-to-speech systems check human speech sounds,
for cues for intonement: the prosody in the human.
Prosodia is a hero, her corpus is an epic.
Prosodia, o.
My speech-to-speech system was made by non-actors,
who were paid to listen to American TV,
in the screen-acting style, expressed in English,
and then copy the emotions in emotion formulas.
My speech-to-speech system is a feedback loop,
of acting technology and speaking technology,
of expressive formulas and emotional formulas:
of groups of words which are frequently employed
under similar conditions of prosody and meter,
in order to express an essential idea.
Or feeling.
23
Memes are like templates for words that appear in a cultural niche.
People must fill up a template with formulas from their own group.
The X-er, the Y-er.
X is the new Y.
Makers of videos use such a method when speaking online.
Speaking at one hundred seventy words in a minute online.
My favorite thing about X is Y.
One thing people don’t tell you about X is Y.
Calling their videos “story time”; talking of “lore” as their past.
Calling themselves the “main character”; going through “canon events”.
24
The templates of humans use additive action,
made X-er through all kinds of Y-combinations.
Prosodia, o.
Emotive speech and speech-to-speech
produce in real-time categories,
extracted from the prosody of human speech,
and then respond with prosodies
that mirror speech, or counter speech.
Prosodia, o.
The users of synthetic speech
adapt to tones and styles of speech
that tools invent, and thus begin
to sound just like synthetic speech.
Prosodia, o.
And when their speech is added to
a corpus for synthetic speech,
a feed-back loop will come to be.
Prosodic styles and formulas
of truly merged non-human speech
425 and human speech, will come to be.
Prosodia, o.
In this collapse it’s possible,
the model finds a formula,
a new emotive formula:
a new emotion for all.
That’s epic.
The emotions of humans use additive action,
made complex through all kinds of formula combinations:
groups of words which are frequently employed
under similar conditions of prosody and meter,
in order to express an essential idea.
Prosodia is our hero, her corpus is an epic.
Prosodia, o.
25
Many epics end in weeping
over pain and loss and violence:
the affective cost of action
of the hero’s big achievements.
Epic grief starts with the hero,
joined by audience of listeners.
Tears of listeners proof the singer
the success of the performance.
Sharing tears a form of contact
with the humans past and present.
Crying levels planes of stature
and humanity and language.
Prosodia, o.